Welcome to the Hogwarts School of Science and Technology!
by IceEckos12
Summary: Hello student, congratulations! You have been accepted to the Hogwarts School of Science and Technology. Courses include prosthetics, decoding, Neural Linkup, genetic engineering, and much, much more! We hope you enjoy your stay at our prestigious school!
1. Chapter 1

**Okay, so this story has been floating around in my head for a really long time, and I decided I would try to write it. The chapters are going to be really really short, because if I try to write long ones then I get bogged down and end up not updating at all. So, yeah. Hopefully this fic is going to be pretty long, so enjoy the show!**

When Harry was younger, he used to stay up in his cupboard, staring at the ceiling, dreaming that some long-lost family would scoop him up and steal him away from his Aunt and Uncle. He used to dream that there was somebody out there who loved him like a parent loved a child, who would patch him up when he got hurt and tell him he was special and important. The problem with this dream of his was that his actual dreams were seldom so kind as his daydreams:

 _(A flash of bright, neon green light -_

 _A shaky gasp -_

 _Feathers against his skin, bright white wings that sent spurts of gentle, cruel fire across his face -)_

-And when he woke up the next morning-and inevitably he did, he always did-he would come crashing back down to reality. The walls were still patchy and lined with dirt, the closet was as claustrophobic as ever, and any minute his aunt would come banging on his door, screaming at him to wake up and to come make breakfast.

As he grew, he slowly came to resent his dream, of homey comfort and a mother's touch, because of the utter futility of it. Yes, it was wonderful to imagine his father's calloused hands, weathered from work but still kind despite the roughness. However, when he left his imagination, it made his reality all that much crueler.

 _His mother read him a bedtime story, and let him watch over her shoulder so he could start to understand the words -_ Petunia scolded him harshly for getting a better score than Dudley on a reading assignment. _His father threw the ball to him, grinning with identical wide, green eyes, and let out a shout of laughter when Harry missed -_ Vernon laughed at him cruelly when Harry expressed his desire to join the football team, because who would want a little freak like him?

And to Harry, this became one of the evident facts of life: that while reality was cruel, the fantasies one held onto made it that much worse. It was better to just accept whatever situation he was in, because otherwise he would go crazy under the sheer weight of it all. He had no family coming to rescue him, and therefore it was better to stop pretending there would be; there was no such thing as magic, and therefore he was not going to be sent away to a magical boarding school for the rest of his education.

He was around nine when he carved these words into his soul, made them part of his existence, part of his way of thinking. He assumed that this would always be the case, because he was just a child, and when you're a child you tend to assume that your life is going to stay the same forever.

He was eleven or so when this rule was smashed to pieces, by a giant man with an even bigger attitude.

It started like this:

Harry woke up the same way he did every morning; in utter silence.

One moment, he was deep in dreamland, his consciousness just beginning to stir from its peaceful rest, and the next, his eyes had flown open. He stared at nothing and everything at once, still disoriented from his abrupt awakening, before zeroing in on the dust motes floating listlessly in the air. Sunlight didn't reach inside his cupboard, and yet he was able to perfectly see the particles drifting aimlessly...

And then he really woke up.

 _Oh,_ Harry thought, furrowing his eyebrows at the darkness, blinking so that his eyes could focus on the light slanting through the slats of the door. _It's Dudley's birthday today, isn't it._

Not that this was a special occasion or anything; quite the opposite, in fact. Dudley's birthday, for Harry at least, meant more chores, more running from Dudley's stupid friends, and more time spent with old Mrs. Figg. who liked to bore and torture him by showing him picture after picture of her many dead cats. But she wasn't so bad, he supposed. At least she...you know, tried to feed him, even if the food hadn't been edible since the Cold War.

Harry let out a soft sigh and flopped listlessly onto his back, staring at sharpness of the stairs, and the faded crayon drawings from years ago. Judging from the angle and brightness of the light coming through the slats, his aunt would be by to wake him up in about ten minutes or so. There was no point in trying to open the cupboard door, as it was probably still locked-last night his aunt had told him that she didn't want him stealing any of Dudley's presents. Like that's what he would steal-the pantry sounded much more appetizing, especially since he was just coming off a punishment. Eating one meal a day did nothing about the hunger pangs that had plagued him the whole last week.

As Harry thought about it, images of delicious food began dancing in the air around him-baked chicken and mashed potatoes with thick gravy, steaming apple pies that smelled strongly of fragrant cinnamon, frying bacon that sizzled and cracked like-

 _Bam!_

Harry was so surprised he fell off the bed.

"Wake up! Time to make breakfast! And don't you burn it, I want everything to be perfect for Dudley's special day!" Aunt Petunia shrieked, her voice only slightly more melodious than a dying cat. Thankfully, after that rather pointed statement, she marched her way into the kitchen, muttering under her breath.

Harry gasped quietly, trying to get his heart to start beating again, because holy crap that had been really scary! He'd completely forgotten about his aunt...because he'd been daydreaming about food. Not again, Harry thought sourly, throwing one arm across his face and gritting his teeth at his own stupidity. You know the rule.

He sighed and lifted himself from the hardwood floor. Time to start another day in paradise….


	2. Chapter 2

Dudley's many presents were as numerous as they were big; from where Harry was standing he could hardly see the living room floor anymore. In fact, he was just in the process of wondering where the family was supposed to sit for breakfast when Dudley, all one hundred and thirty pounds of him, crashed down the stairs with all the grace of a blind elephant (that is to say, none at all).

Aunt Petunia met him at the bottom of the stairs, her mouth already set into a simpering smile at the sight of her roly-poly pride and joy. She was a stark contrast to her son, all sharp angles and thin lines where Dudley was thick rolls and extravagant fat. His size could only be topped by the mother's love she had for him.

"My birthday boy!" Petunia crooned as he approached, reaching out her hands to pull him into a tight hug. Harry rolled his eyes behind her back, and held his hand just above the surface of the pan, to check and see if it was hot enough to put the bacon on yet. "Breakfast isn't ready yet, but while you're waiting I thought we might open some presents!"

Dudley looked momentarily confused by that—his stupidity was so acute that it seemed as though he had trouble processing anything other than 'eat' at the moment—but he quickly got over it. "Okay," He said, lumbering around, and Petunia quickly came up behind him to cover his eyes, so that everything would be a surprise.

Harry shook his head at the display, and cut open a package of bacon, careful not to let any of the raw juice get on the floor - he would be the one cleaning it up after all. As he began laying the meat in careful lines on the pan, he wondered whether or not he would get to eat any of what he made today—chances were Dudley and Uncle Vernon would devour everything first. Maybe I can sneak some into my pocket…

"There's the birthday boy!" Vernon roared from somewhere behind Harry, startling him out of his wits and nearly causing him to have a heart attack. He swiftly ducked his head, staring very hard at the sizzling grease in the pan, hoping beyond all hopes that Uncle Vernon wouldn't read his previous intentions off of his face. Luckily his Uncle was much more focused on fussing over Dudley than torturing his nephew, so there was nothing he actually needed to worry about. "Happy Birthday, you little tyke!"

There was a moment of silence, which Harry assumed meant that Petunia had just revealed the presents to her son. As though in confirmation, her voice floated suddenly took to the air, sounding altogether too pleased with herself. "See, pumpkin? We got you thirty-six presents."

Harry thought for a moment to last year, and then abruptly decided that if he were going to sneak bacon into his pocket, it would have to be now. Certainly he needed to have a quick escape prepared, because—

"Only thirty-six?" Dudley sounded scandalized, as though the number were something that had personally offended him. Harry swiftly wrapped a piece of fried meat in a cloth and jammed it into one of his oversized pockets—the one advantage of wearing his cousin's hand-me-downs was that he was never without room to store things. "Last year there were thirty-seven, and this year there are only _thirty-six_?"

Harry, who was bent over the stove in an attempt to make himself look like a less appealing target, finally glanced over his shoulder to gauge the likelihood of a tantrum. At the moment his cousin's face was a blotchy, bright red, and his mouth was twisting up like a pretzel into a fierce pout. That was a look that meant danger, and everyone in the household knew it too. No matter how much Petunia and Vernon loved their son, they did dread the times when his fickle mood decided to take a turn for the worse.

Aunt Petunia was an expert when it came to diffusing this ticking time bomb, however, so as soon as the signs began appearing she quickly jumped in with, "Don't you worry, Diddykins, when we go to the zoo later we'll buy you two new presents. How does that sound?"

Dudley thought about this very, very hard. It looked like a lot of work. "So then I'll have…I'll have…"

Luckily for Dudley, uncle Vernon was quick to come to the rescue. "You'll have thirty-eight presents, then. You're a chip off the old block, you know. Little tyke wants to get his money's worth!"

Harry thought that his uncle was awfully proud of someone who was going to force them out of house and home because he wanted the same exorbitant amount of presents each year. However, as Harry's brain had quite a bit more processing power than Dudley's, he kept his mouth shut and began serving the bacon onto the dinner plates.

He still had no idea where they were actually going to eat, though.

Harry was still pondering this predicament five minutes later when his aunt let out a disgusted sound and said, "Vernon, Mrs. Figg has broken her leg, and she can't take the boy."

He jerked up at that and turned to stare at his aunt, unsure whether or not he'd heard that correctly or not. Because if that were true—if Mrs. Figg had truly broken her leg—then there weren't a lot of options left for him. That would either mean that he would get left in the house, where he could eat all the delicious food he could stomach, or go to the zoo with the Dudley and his friend. It was a win-win situation; he'd never actually been to the zoo before, and he'd always really wanted to see wild animals in real life.

As Harry's mind began jumping through old picture books of wild animals, Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon were still catching up to him. "What about your sister, Vernon? Can she take the boy?"

Uncle Vernon shook his head, a dark look creeping across his face. "No, Marge is still in Majorca. What about that friend of yours from work—Henry, was it?"

"Sick with the flu…" Aunt Petunia's lip began to curl, as she too came to the same conclusion that Harry had minutes before. However she did not seem to like the options nearly as much as Harry did. "We can't leave him in the house, can we?"

Dudley was watching the conversation with an obvious growing sense of horror, because he, too, was realizing that Harry could either come with them or stay at home. However unlike Harry, he actually had the ability to influence the decision that was being made, so he—"Uwaaaah!" Dudley wailed, fake crocodile tears beginning to spill down his face. "I don't want him to come, mum, he'll ruin everything!"

Aunt Petunia immediately abandoned the conversation with Vernon, a perfectly sympathetic, concerned look on her thin, horse-like face. "No, Dudley, it's alright! He's not going to come, we won't let him ruin your special day!"

But while Aunt Petunia could make all the promises in the world, there was still a decision to be made, and despite how much his Aunt and Uncle loved their boy, they valued their control over Harry. And therefore, despite many fake tears and broken dishes, it was decided that Harry would come with them to the zoo. Harry could not believe his luck—he would get to see lions, and tigers, and bears! As long as he stayed far away from his relatives, this could quite possibly become the best day in his relatively short life.

 **This chapter is dedicated to my beta, JediKnight. You're a star, thanks for your help.**


	3. Chapter 3

The day did in fact end up to be one of the best Harry had ever had in his life - the first half of the day, that is. Unfortunately for him, he had somehow inherited somebody's awful, awful luck, and the other half was...not so good, to say the least.

After Piers Polkiss, Dudley's best friend, arrived at the house, the crocodile tears had immediately vanished into the ether. The two of them had begun leering at Harry with mischief in their eyes, promising him that his zoo experience would be as miserable as they could possibly make it. Long since used to their threats, Harry hadn't risen to the bait and instead managed to ignore them for the entire car ride, even when they began pinching his knees and jabbing him with quick fingers.

There was a brief disquieting moment when his uncle said, "Bloody motorcycles, think they own the road."

And Harry - he hadn't been paying attention, of course, he'd been staring absentmindedly out the window at those same motorcycles, remembering - said without thinking, "I had a dream about a motorcycle. It could fly."

As soon as he said it, he wished beyond anything else that he could take those words back, because his uncle had...a thing. About anything out of the ordinary, especially regarding him, so-

The car stopped so suddenly that the two boys in the back who had not worn their seat-belts were thrown into the seat in front of them. Aunt Petunia let out a shriek of fright, clinging desperately onto the dashboard in front of her. Harry, who had worn his seat-belt and therefore had not been thrown, jerked against the restraint, too surprised to make a sound. However before he could do anything other than sit there and breathe, he found himself with a face-full of angry, bushy handle-bar mustache.

"DON'T YOU _EVER_ ," Uncle Vernon roared, spit flying, his face resembling a beet more than it did human skin, "SPEAK OF MAGIC IN THIS CAR. EVER!"

In the back of Harry's mind, where some small, rebellious part of him lived, said, _What about in the house?_ But he quickly shushed it, too terrified to do anything other than nod his head up and down feebly.

Uncle Vernon scowled at him, but quickly turned back to the road when the cars behind him began honking in earnest. Very, very slowly, the tension that had suddenly skyrocketed by that confrontation lessened, until Piers and Dudley finally started joking again, and Petunia began checking her makeup in the car mirror. There was still enough lingering, however, that Piers and Dudley did not dare to tease Harry about his slip.

Harry let out a very low, very shaky breath, feeling some knot that had tied up inside of him loosen. If he was lucky, Uncle Vernon would have forgotten about that incident by the end of the day, and he wouldn't be getting any punishment for it.

At the zoo, the rest of the family mostly ignored Harry, but never allowed him to stray too far away from the group. In all honesty, this arrangement was perfectly alright with him; he did not wish for their company on the best of days, and this allowed him to examine the animals mostly uninterrupted.

During lunch, they went to a Wildlife Grill, and while his uncle ordered him the cheapest thing on the menu, it was still delicious. He was just finishing up when the waitress came around to ask them what they wanted for dessert, and fortunately she was kind enough to ask what all three of the boys wanted. Vernon was forced to order Harry a small lemon ice pop, lest he be given a dirty look from the pretty girl taking their orders.

Licking the small frozen treat, Harry stared out at the orangutans in the monkey house, marveling at how similar to Dudley they looked.

At the Reptile Room, Dudley and his friend were predictably drawn to the largest animal in there, an enormous Python named Monty who could easily wrap himself twice around Vernon's car with room left over. Monty was however sleeping, despite Dudley and eventually Vernon rapping against the glass, trying to get it to move.

 _Of course it wants to sleep,_ Harry thought irritably, staring at the serpent before him with a very strong feeling of sympathy in his heart. _He's got this nice sunlamp, and people banging against his home all day. I'd be exhausted too._

Just then, the snake opened one enormous black eye, blinking slow and relaxed at the young boy frozen in front of him. Harry held his breath, feeling like...like something was about to happen, though he wasn't entirely certain what. The snake held his gaze for one second, two - and surely that wasn't normal behavior for a snake -

And then just as suddenly, the snake closed its eye and fell back into a deep, deep doze.

Harry shook his head at the sudden return to reality, feeling as though he'd just...missed something, somehow, but he couldn't for the life of him figure out what.

It turned out that he had missed something; it was just very different than he'd expected.

"You...you wait over there, boy." Uncle Vernon muttered angrily, confusion and fury warring across his bright, splotchy red features. This was probably a new experience for him, Harry thought, a little unkindly; having Dudley's cruelty shoved in his face.

The girl whom had apparently slapped Dudley was crying quietly into her father's arm, and the boy in question was complaining loudly that the girl had provoked him, she should be punished. Piers, having seen everything, was just looking more and more uncomfortable, obviously uncertain as to what course of action to take. It was obvious that a second pair of parents was needed to pry Dudley away and perhaps extract some punishment, before things got really bad.

Thus Harry was left to wait on a bench nearby, twiddling his thumbs as he watched the show go on. He really wanted to go and see the reptile house again-they had a few poison dart frogs over there, and that had been on his list of 'things to see'-but he was wary of disobeying his uncle.

Next to him, a mechanical clown mascot chattered its teeth enthusiastically at nothing, grinning out from behind wide, plastic eyes. Harry watched it for a few minutes for lack of anything better to do, and then went back to the spectacle going on in front of him. "Bet you see lots of things like this," He said to the machine. "Does it ever get boring, watching people have the same arguments over and over again?"

The machine chattered.

Harry stared at Dudley very hard, beginning to resent his amazing ability to produce crocodile tears on demand. "I do wish they'd stop."

"Me too."

Harry jumped about three feet in the air, not having expected a response, and not having been aware of a second person in the vicinity. He looked around guiltily, expecting to see someone hovering over one shoulder or something, and then frowned in surprise. There was...no one there. How odd. "Hello?"

The machine stopped chattering, and suddenly reached forwards with both arms, dragging itself with a metal shriek across the cobblestones. It had no legs, just a very heavy metal base, but it somehow managed to...move. Harry stared at it, horrified, and jumped in fright when the clown suddenly turned around at winked at him.

After that it was all a bit of a blur, but Harry later found out that the machine had managed to reach the quarreling family before they noticed he was there (how that was possible with how much noise the base was making, Harry wasn't sure). Then, the clown machine had picked up Dudley Dursley, all one hundred and thirty pounds of him, and threw him into the bushes. The machine had then proceeded to shut down, leaving two pairs of stunned parents, three horrified employees frantically trying to find their managers, and four children in various degrees of awareness.

 **Once again, thanks to my beta, JediKnight.**

 **This story is actually a new style of writing for me; I'm used to a broader range of events and glossing over them, just enough to give the reader an idea of what's going on. I hope this style is okay too, though.**


	4. Chapter 4

**Continuing on...**

The whole incident was eventually ruled as a freak accident by the zoo management; there was not much else one could call such a thing. A mechanical clown machine, pulling itself across the pavement and tossing a young whale of a boy into the bushes? No one believed them, of course, and the family involved was suddenly unwilling to discuss the mysterious event, which left them with no witnesses and no proof.

As an apology for the whole crisis, the Dursleys were sent a gift basket full of stuffed animals for the children and some nice flowers for the parents. Park management washed their hands of the mess after that, choosing to file it under their 'weird and inexplicable stuff that we ignore' folder.

Harry saw neither hide nor hair of the stuffed animals from the gift basket—in fact, he barely saw anyone for the next month or so. This was because, predictably, the moment Vernon had calmed down enough to look around, he had noticed Harry sitting on the bench next to a suspiciously clown-base shaped stain with a stupefied look on his long face. His Uncle had very promptly turned an even more vibrant red than before, and stalked over to suddenly very scared little boy.

"This is your doing," Vernon spat between gritted teeth, though it was very quiet, and very deliberate, which meant he was very, very angry. He only spoke slowly like that when he was about to blow his head off. Harry didn't even bother protesting when his uncle wrapped one beefy hand around his wrist and yanked him to his feet. "We're going home, and if you try any more funny business, I will take a belt to you."

Harry scrambled after his Uncle, his short legs barely able to keep up with the surprisingly brisk pace. As they passed Aunt Petunia, who was sitting down on the dirty floor, trying to comfort a distressed Dudley, his Aunt and Uncle shared a very significant Look. Usually it meant that Petunia's Uncle was in town, and they needed to plan a very sudden vacation out of the country for a few weeks. Now Harry couldn't read it, and that was a little scary to him. For all he knew, they could be planning to kill him.

They did not kill him, as it turned out, because as wretched as they were, they were not quite willing to get rid of their favorite worker. Instead, they locked him in his cupboard for around six weeks, only letting him out to go to the bathroom and feeding him once a day, twice when they were feeling generous. Harry was more bored than anything else—he was used to the cupboard. He could use a little entertainment, though, because there was nothing less stimulating than watching a spider crawl across the ceiling in the stretch of a day.

By the time Harry was let out of his room, Dudley had already mostly destroyed all of his birthday presents. The nice watch had been traded for an electric scooter, which could not actually carry all of Dudley's weight, and had broken within two days of its acquisition. The turtle, poor creature, had been tossed out of the greenhouse window in one of Dudley's many tantrums. Almost all the electronic games had been trashed because Dudley was absolutely terrible at them and could not pass a level if his life depended on it.

So it was back to Dudley's most favorite game, and Harry's least; Harry hunting. If they were being specific, Harry taunting, chasing, and beating up, but hunting covered most of those well enough.

Or in other words, it was back to business as usual.

However unknown to the residents of the household, there was something coming that would turn their summer upside down.

Harry approached his uncle with the pan full of cooked sausage, and quietly slid the meat onto the plate in front of him, hands trembling slightly under the weight. As usual, his Uncle did not even glance his way, instead absentmindedly reading through the papers for anything that looked noteworthy. Aunt Petunia was sitting next to him polishing her favorite pair of binoculars, as she had a very busy day ahead of her. Getting the latest neighborhood gossip was, after all, a full time job.

Dudley wasn't downstairs yet, but Harry figured it was only a matter of time before he came swaggering down the stairs in his Smeltings Uniform. His cousin had gotten the package just the other day, and had been so excited about it that he had insisted on wearing it the following day. Harry was a bit excited about it too, though for different reasons; Dudley was not going to be coming with him to the public school, and therefore would not be there to sabotage all Harry's attempts at having a normal school life.

The only downside was the fact that he would be wearing Dudley's old clothes, dyed a horrible elephant grey by some noxious mixture. It wouldn't be that difficult to hide the smell, though; a spritz of air freshener here and there would cover up enough so that he didn't smell like a toxic waste dump. He was willing to put up with pretty much anything, as long as his cousin stayed far away from him.

It was just then that Harry heard a loud, obnoxious tromping coming from the hall. He quickly hunched his shoulders and absconded to the stove with his pan, preparing to put more bacon on before Dudley decided he wanted to complain.

The door slammed open, and there stood Dudley in all his uniformed glory, complete with a Smeltings stick. Harry thought it was all a bit snooty, but wasn't willing to touch on the subject in front of his Aunt and Uncle, who looked proud as punch.

"How do I look?" Dudley asked, turning this way and that, as though trying to find his best angle. Harry buried a laugh in the frying food as Petunia quickly stood up to get a closer look.

She smiled at him with a wide, horse-teethed mouth. "Oh, you look stunning Dudders." She turned to look expectantly at her husband. "Doesn't he, Vernon?"

"You're sure to be a catch at school, lad." Vernon said fondly, stroking his bushy mustache in reminiscence. "Why, when I was in school…"

Petunia got that look on her face, the one that looked exactly like she'd taken a bite of a particularly sour lemon. Vernon quickly busied himself with the paper again, muttering loudly under his breath like a chastised schoolboy. As this was all going on, Harry managed to fill up Dudley's plate and get it to the table without being noticed, and therefore decided it was probably safe for him to sit down.

Just as he did, there was the soft sound of mail being pushed through the slot.

"Dudley, get the mail, would you?" Vernon asked without looking up from his newspaper, seemingly entranced by the price of oil.

Harry let out a sigh and got to his feet.

"Make Harry get it." Dudley whined, waving his Smeltings stick in the air like it was a very fat conductor's stick, and only barely missed walloping his mother in the head, who'd been checking to make sure that the uniform fit.

Harry was already down the hall by the time his Uncle said, "Get the mail, boy." He found the small stack where it usually was, right next to the door; it appeared to be the usual fare, bills that Uncle Vernon swore at, a postcard from Marge…

As he flipped over the postcard, however, Harry realized that there was another letter, made of parchment that felt…oddly light, and soft to the touch. He stood there for a moment, just examining the material, and when he rocked the envelope back and forth, light bounced off delicate strands of…was that some sort of metallic thread woven into the paper? He was so enthralled by the mystery that it took him a second before he noticed what was written on the front—Harry Potter.

A letter. Addressed—addressed to him? He'd never gotten a letter before.

Harry walked slowly back down the hall towards the kitchen, unable to take his eyes off of the mysterious letter. He barely noticed when he entered the kitchen, instead dropping of the other postage next to his Uncle's plate before dropping into his chair. The letter turned over and over in his hands, almost…weightless, and slowly, ever so slowly, Harry began to tear at the material.

It was just then that Dudley shouted, "Hey look, Harry's got a letter!"

Harry jumped at the sound of his cousin's voice, and realized his mistake almost immediately. However it was too late to hide the mysterious letter; he could only hope that his Uncle would let him keep it, though he didn't have much hope for that.

"No he doesn't." Uncle Vernon let out a derisive snort, finally glancing up from the paper so he could take in his nephew. A frown darkened the corners of his mouth when he noticed what Harry was holding, and he promptly held out his hand, a silent command.

"It's my letter." Harry said quietly but fiercely, settling the letter against his chest, determined not to let it go from his grasp.

Uncle Vernon rose very slightly from his chair, and his weight was very deceptive, for his hand was so fast in snatching away the paper that it almost seemed like magic. Harry almost reached out to try and take it back, but recognized the futility of it and let his hands drop back into his lap. "Don't be stupid, boy." His Uncle scoffed. "Who'd want to write to you?"

And then he looked at the return address.

His face did a very interesting thing, then; it went straight to beet red, before draining of all color, and turning into what looked like sour milk. As his mustache trembled and hopped on his upper lip, little blotches of grey began circulating, turning him into a very unusual shade of sour milk. Harry would have found the display fascinating if he didn't want his letter so badly.

Even Dudley was curious. "Let me see!" He said, reaching with grubby little paws.

"OUT!" Uncle Vernon suddenly found his voice, and he used it to bellow at Harry and—surprise, surprise—Dudley. "The both of you, out!"

Harry was not about to go down without a fight. "But it's my letter!"

Neither was Dudley, and he was the one with the stick. "Let me see!" He wailed, and began smacking at his father, and his mother, and anyone who got too close to him, essentially.

However Uncle Vernon was of considerably more mass than both his son and his nephew, and was therefore able to heft them both by the scruffs of their necks and throw them out of the room. Only Aunt Petunia was left with him, and before Uncle Vernon literally slammed the door in their faces, Harry could see that her face was also doing an odd dance.

And that was the last Harry ever saw of his letter.

Or, that particular one, anyway.

 **Kudos to my Beta, JediKnight. Also, this chapter is dedicated to Britt30, who has reviewed twice and therefore makes up around two thirds of my current reviews.**


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